Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental condition in which children show reduced attention to social aspects of the environment. However in adults with ASD, evidence for social attentional deficits is equivocal. One problem is that many paradigms present social information in an unrealistic, isolated way. This study presented adults and adolescents, with and without ASD, with a complex social scene alongside another, non-social scene, and measured eye-movements during a 3-s viewing period. Analyses first identified viewing time to different regions and then investigated some more complex issues. These were: the location of the very first fixation in a trial (indicating attentional priority); the effect of a task instruction on scan paths; the extent to which gaze-following was evident; and the degree to which participants' scan paths were influenced by the low-level properties of a scene. Results indicate a superficially normal attentional preference for social information in adults with ASD. However, more sensitive measures show that ASD does entail social attention problems across the lifespan, supporting accounts of the disorder which emphasise lifelong neurodevelopmental atypicalities. These subtle abnormalities may be sufficient to produce serious difficulties in real-life scenarios.

A preferential-looking paradigm was used to investigate how gaze is distributed in naturalistic scenes. Two scenes were presented side by side: one contained a single person (person-present) and one did not (person-absent). Eye movements were recorded, the principal measures being the time spent looking at each region of the scenes, and the latency and location of the first fixation within each trial. We studied gaze patterns during free viewing, and also in a task requiring gender discrimination of the human figure depicted. Results indicated a strong bias towards looking to the person-present scene. This bias was present on the first fixation after image presentation, confirming previous findings of ultra-rapid processing of complex information. Faces attracted disproportionately many fixations, the preference emerging in the first fixation and becoming stronger in the following ones. These biases were exaggerated in the gender-discrimination task. A tendency to look at the object being fixated by the person in the scene was shown to be strongest at a slightly later point in the gaze sequence. We conclude that human bodies and faces are subject to special perceptual processing when presented as part of a naturalistic scene.

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We investigated Ricciardelli et al.'s (2002) claim, that the tendency for gaze direction to elicit automatic attentional following is unique to biologically significant information. Participants made voluntary saccades to targets on the left or the right of a display, which were either congruent or incongruent with a centrally presented distractor (eye-gaze or arrow). Contrary to Ricciardelli et al., for both distractor types, saccade latencies were slower, and participants made more directional errors, on incongruent than on congruent trials. Moreover, a cost-benefit analysis showed no difference between the two distractor types. However, latencies for erroneous saccades were faster than correctly directed saccades for the eye-gaze distractors, but not for the arrow distractors. Perception & Psychophysics 2007, 69 (6), 966-971 G. Kuhn, gustav.kuhn@durham.ac.uk

People with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show reduced interest towards social aspects of the environment and a lesser tendency to follow other people's gaze in the real world. However, most studies have shown that people with ASD do respond to eye-gaze cues in experimental paradigms, though it is possible that this behaviour is based on an atypical strategy. We tested this possibility in adults with ASD using a cueing task combined with eye-movement recording. Both eye gaze and arrow pointing distractors resulted in overt cueing effects, both in terms of increased saccadic reaction times, and in proportions of saccades executed to the cued direction instead of to the target, for both participant groups. Our results confirm previous reports that eye gaze cues as well as arrow cues result in automatic orienting of overt attention. Moreover, since there were no group differences between arrow and eye gaze cues, we conclude that overt attentional orienting in ASD, at least in response to centrally presented schematic directional distractors, is typical.